Your Meditation Guide Blog

“The evidence is in. The scientific community has reached a clear consensus that vaccines don’t cause autism. There is no controversy.” So begins an in-depth discussion of the vaccines-cause-autism nonsense penned by “SkepDoc” Harriet Hall in a recent issue of eSkeptic. It is a must read for any thinking person who has been baffled by the likes of Jenny McCarthy and her unconscionable sponsors, boyfriend Jim Carrey (who bankrolls McCarthy’s dangerous ignorance) and Oprah Winfrey (who provides McCarthy with television time so that she can endanger the lives of even more children).

The SkepDoc helpfully traces the history of this pseudoscientific tale, dividing it into three acts. The original claim came from a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield, who in 1998 published an article in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, proposing that the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine may cause autism because 8 of 10 autistic children he had examined seemed to have developed their autistic symptoms immediately after having been vaccinated, according to their parents. If this sounds like pretty flimsy evidence, it is: the paper was eventually retracted by the journal and by most of Wakefield’s co-authors. It turned out that the doctor did not use any controls at all, ignored negative virological studies that had disproved his thesis even before the publication of the paper, had undisclosed financial conflicts of interest in the matter (he was paid by the lawyers of some of the families whose children he used in his research), and had violated ethical rules of conduct (he bought blood by bribing the children at a birthday party). Moreover, Wakefield’s findings could not be replicated by other studies, so you’d think that would be the end of the story. Nope: the bastard — once charged by the British General Medical Council with professional misconduct — simply moved to the United States, where he is happily making money by working in an autism clinic. As a result of Wakefield’s unconscionable “study”, vaccination rates in the UK dropped, cases of measles went up, and children died. Pseudoscience can kill.

Phase two of the craze, according to Dr. Hall, can be traced back to legislation passed (also in 1998) with the aim of reducing the total amount of mercury that children get through the thimerosal that was used in vaccinations. The intention was good, though it turns out that the dangerous form of mercury is methylmercury, not the ethylmercury found in vaccines. Accordingly, the law was not prompted by any published research or serious assessment conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency. Instead, two mothers (!!) conducted their own “research” and claimed that the symptoms of autism are identical to those induced by mercury poisoning. As Hall points out, this is simply false, period. At any rate, thimerosal was eliminated from vaccines in 1999. You would therefore expect the rate of autism to have gone significantly down as a result, if the hypothesis of a causal link were somehow correct. It didn’t, in fact, it went up. Moreover, a dangerous cottage industry of people selling crackpot remedies against mercury poisoning has emerged, with quacks like Mark and David Geier selling a method that amounts to a very painful process of chemical castration for the hefty sum of $5000-6000 a month. Pseudoscience can hurt, badly.

The third phase of this saga identified by Hall is the one that has seen the above-mentioned McCarthy and Winfrey involved, among others, and it is the even broader (and even less substantiated) claim that all vaccines produced by “Big Pharma” are harmful and are causing an epidemic of autism. McCarthy has an autistic child, and of course she is absolutely convinced that her motherly instincts trump science. She apparently realizes the dire consequences of what she is doing, if somewhat dimly. Here is a quote by McCarthy from the eSkeptic article: “I do believe sadly it’s going to take some diseases coming back to realize that we need to change and develop vaccines that are safe. If the vaccine companies are not listening to us, it’s their fucking fault that the diseases are coming back. They’re making a product that’s shit.” The problem is, of course, that current vaccines are in fact as safe as vaccines are going to be, and the dangers are only in Miss McCarthy’s deranged mind. (Incidentally, there seems to be a reliable claim that McCarthy’s son developed autistic symptoms before he was vaccinated, thereby putting in question either the mother’s “instincts” or her good faith.) Pseudoscience can make you a celebrity, the health of the children be damned.

Dr. Hall very appropriately quotes Jonathan Swift in the context of this discussion: “Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after.” That, of course, is true for the lies of pseudoscience as much as for those of politics (which was Swift’s main concern). What is astounding and deeply disturbing to me is that America seems to be enthralled with this manufactured controversy about science: a substantial portion of the public is convinced that vaccines are bad, while scientists agree that they are as safe as they can be; half of the public thinks that global warming is a myth, while the overwhelming majority of competent scientists keep telling us that we are in dire straits that are getting more and more dire; and of course more than half of Americans reject evolution, despite the fact that the theory has been accepted in science since the end of the 19th century.

There is no simple solution to this problem, though these “controversies” are making the American population more ignorant (evolution), sick (vaccines) and environmentally unconscionable (global warming) than ever. Scientists and science educators need to do their part to counter this nonsense, of course. But celebrities like Carey and Winfrey ought to stop promoting bullshit because they are sleeping with a nutcase or out of a misplaced sense of wanting to help others from the dangerous depths of sheer ignorance. And of course the public at large has a duty to society to be informed and attempt to make the best decisions based on the most reliable sources of evidence. The information is out there, people, just use your brains.

James: Zen Master Seung Sahn is one of the most fascinating personalities and wise teachers in Buddhism today. His style is so approachable from the videos, quotes and writings that I have seen/read.

He has a way of teaching serious subjects in fun, innovative and yet always challenging ways. The ability to teach from so many different angles is the sign of a great teacher to me because people learn in various ways and are at different points along the spectrum of practice.

From the 1985 Sumner Kyol Che Opening, Ceremony:

Linc just said, "Zen is very simple. Dishwashing time, just wash dishes; sitting time, just sit; driving time, just drive; talking time, just talk; walking time, just walk." That's all. Not special. But that is very difficult. That is absolutes thinking. When you're doing something, just do it. No opposites. No subject, no object. No inside, no outside. Outside and inside become one. That's called absolutes.

It's easy to talk about "When you're doing something, just do it," but action is very difficult. Sitting: thinking, thinking, thinking. Chanting: also thinking, thinking. Bowing time: not so much, but some thinking, thinking, checking, checking mind appear. Then you have a problem.

But don't hold. Thinking is OK. Checking is OK. Only holding is a problem. Don't hold. Feeling coming, going, OK. Don't hold. If your mind is not holding anything, it is clear like space. Clear like space means that sometimes clouds come, sometimes rain or lightning or airplane comes, or even a missile blows up, BOOM! World explodes, but the air is never broken. This space is never broken.

Yeah, other things are broken but this space is never changing. Even if a nuclear bomb explodes, it doesn't matter. Space is space. That mind is very important. If something in your mind explodes, then don't hold it. Then it will disappear. Sometimes anger mind appears but soon disappears. But if you hold it, you have a problem. Appear, disappear, that's OK. Don't hold. Then it becomes wisdom. My anger mind becomes wisdom. My desire mind becomes wisdom. Everything becomes wisdom. That's interesting, yeah? So don't hold. That's very important point.

-Zen Master Seung Sahn

~Peace to all beings~

* Bill Maher on how the Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into a mental hospital...

"We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form."

--William Ralph Inge, writer and Anglican Prelate (1860-1954).

I’ve been reading Kevin Roose’s The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University, which makes for both irritating and fascinating reading. It’s the story of a semester the author spent at ultra-conservative Liberty University as a (temporary) transfer student from ultra-liberal Brown, with the aim of getting the insider’s view of what fundamentalist Christianity is all about. You can check out my Amazon review of the book if you are interested in my broad assessment of it (the short version: enjoyable read, good attempt by the author at bridging the cultural divide, unfortunate tendency by Roose to overplay the likable side of his Liberty University buddies and even of Jerry Falwell and to downplay their homophobia and bigotry).

What I’d like to focus on here is Roose’s observation, while taking various courses at Liberty, that three themes repeatedly emerged from his interactions with his professors (and I use the word in a very charitable fashion here, for the sake of argument): evolution didn’t happen, abortion is murder, and absolute truth exists. Given my interest in understanding the fundamentalist mind and fighting its pernicious effects on society, it seems to me obligatory to ponder on these three points, which I have also observed form a recurring pattern in my own more than decade-long interactions with Christian fundamentalists (though it should be added that the same themes are strong also in other fundamentalist versions of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim religious mythology).

Roose maintains that there are three ways in which Liberty professors attack evolution: by equating acceptance of evolution to faith in God, by questioning one or another of its scientific tenets (an all-time favorite is, of course, criticism of radio dating of rocks), or by sheer sarcasm (as in “can you believe scientists actually think the human eye is the result of chance? — They don’t, by the way). These are all very telling. The sarcasm is a form of anti-intellectualism that strongly suggests to the faithful that we simple minded folks are in fact much smarter than them PhD-sporting scientists, an anti-expert attitude that of course few fundies actually carry through in any other area of their lives (most of them go to car mechanics, doctors, lawyers, financial consultants and other such experts). The other two tacks are even more fascinating because they are mutually contradictory, and in fact represent two distinct tactics adopted by the creationist movement in the United States during the 20th century. It is simply not coherent to criticize a position on (alleged) scientific grounds (even attempting to present a scientifically acceptable alternative in the form of the oxymoronic “creation science”) while at the same time charging the other side with simply engaging in a religious belief. The content of religious beliefs is not subject to scientific inquiry by its very nature, so one cannot reasonably use science and rationality to criticize an idea, only to switch when convenient to the position that that same idea is held by faith, meaning in spite of the evidence. Then again, there never was much reasonableness in the fundamentalist mind.

Abortion, of course, would take several posts in and of itself, as it is a complex matter even for progressives. I certainly do not subscribe to the idea that abortion should be as easily available as aspirin, or that women have an absolute and unquestionable right to do what they will with the fetuses they carry. To contemplate having an abortion is to engage in an incredibly complex and painful exercise in ethical judgment, and there simply is no easy way out. That said, the fundamentalist insistence on the “sanctity of life” strikes me as hypocritical and ill-founded. First off, most of the same people who scream “baby murder” are also in favor of the death penalty, for instance, or have no trouble sending thousands or even millions of innocents to their death by declaring holy wars of one kind or another. But more to the point, these people seem to be completely incapable of understanding that “personhood” is a continuous process that is only potential at the moment of conception. Is the zygote a human life form? Yes, though it won’t become a human being for months. Is it a human person? At that moment most certainly not. This is important because we recognize rights to persons not to cells (well, we unfortunately recognize rights to corporations too, but that’s a whole different story). If it were biological material that had rights, then sperms and eggs shouldn’t be wasted either (if your mind wandered to Monty Python’s Every Sperm is Sacred you are in good company). Moreover, and rather counterintuitively, fundamentalists should be in favor of human cloning, and should defend the right to existence of every single human cell, since they are all potential human beings that could become actual if they were to go through a cloning process. This position is absurd, of course, but it highlights the idea that there is no simple solution to the issue, no clear black and white, us vs. them approach that is tenable.

And that brings me to the last tenet on Roose’s list: absolute truth (to be found, of course, in the Bible). This is really what fundamentalists of all stripes have a problem with. They simply cannot accept that Truth with a capital T is essentially inaccessible to humans (except when we are talking about logic and mathematics), and that moreover in many real cases of interest to human affairs there is no absolute truth. This doesn’t mean that anything goes (the dreaded extreme postmodernist position), but rather that truth comes in degrees, or that there may be more than one reasonable assessment of a given situation, leading to pluralism on whatever issue one may be considering.

Indeed, it is this obsession with absolute truth, this epistemological hubris if you will, that also explains the other two recurrent themes: fundamentalists wouldn’t have a problem with evolution if they didn’t insist on taking the Bible as the definitive word in matters of history and science (as many moderate Christians in fact don’t). And they would be able to tolerate a range of positions on abortion if they didn’t think that there is an absolute distinction between human and non-human, and an absolute way to determine right and wrong.

There is, of course, no simple solution to the problem of fundamentalism. However, I must admit that — as irritating as Roose’s book becomes at times — he has hit on a good point in his Epilogue: “Humans have always quarreled [I’d say murdered each other, but whatever] over their beliefs, and I suppose they always will. But judging from my post-Liberty experience, this particular religious conflict isn’t built around a hundred-foot brick wall. If anything, it’s built around a flimsy piece of cardboard, held in place on both sides by paranoia and lack of exposure. It’s there, no doubt, but it’s hardly forbidding. And more important, it’s hardly soundproof. Religious conflict might be a basic human instinct, but I have faith [a rather unfortunate choice of word], now more than ever before, that we can subvert that instinct for long enough to listen to each other.”

In other words, start wearing a suitable “Your Friendly Atheist Neighbor” t-shirt. If you really are friendly, the other side might see you as someone to respectfully disagree with, not as a demon to send to hell as expeditiously as possible. That would be progress indeed.

* Bill Maher talks to Keith Obermann about health care and why the Dems should ignore Republican opposition.

* Interview with Bertrand Russell, always a pleasure.

Author Ben Dench certainly isn't the first person to claim that Buddhism teaches self-annihilation and nihilism but I wanted to touch on his article because there is still a lot of misinformation in the west in particular about Buddhism. For example, many Americans continue to think we Buddhists see Buddha as a Creator God to be worshiped. Dench insinuates that the Buddhist denial of the self is escapism and abandonment of life. Unfortunately Mr. Dench like many critics of Buddhism seems not to have studied the issue enough to understand what Buddhists mean by the denial of self.

He says, "In Buddhism, the existence of a self is denied and the goal of Buddhism is to snuff out the flame of consciousness and cease reincarnation." Wow, sounds pretty bad if that's was the truth. We don't seek to "snuff out the flame of consciousness" but rather the flame of desire. As I understand it, (to over simplify this) In Buddhism consciousness is simply awareness of being. In Buddhism our current state of being is limited by much suffering. So why would a person not want to be free of suffering one day? None of us wants to suffer and so at it's core Buddhism seeks to snuff out suffering--not happiness and a sense of meaning as Mr. Dench seems to insinuate.

Now, concerning the idea of denying the existence of a "self"--There are differences a bit on the view of the self between Theravada and Mahayana so I'll speak from the point of view of a Mahayanist. Buddhists deny a permanent self because upon closer inspection through meditation and contemplation it is seen that the idea of a self is a delusion. Thus if something is a delusion then why would we want to embrace it? The understanding of this idea of the "self" being a delusion hinges upon the Buddhist teaching of Dependent Arising, which says phenomena rise along side each other in an interdependent fabric of cause and effect. This is because of that--and that, and that. This computer exists because minerals exist, chemicals exist, engineering exists, designers exist, assemblers exist and so on. Without all of those existing in unison--there is no "computer" as such.

We think we are an individual but if that were the case then we'd have to have appeared in this life without the influence of parents--we'd be an anomaly. Instead we have the DNA of both our mother and father who have their DNA as a result of their mother and father. You have a name but it was given to you by your parents. You have interests but they were developed because of certain conditions and influences, which arose from the infinite pool of potentialities of life. You can not say for example that you'd be the same "permanent self," which you claim that you are now if you had been born under different circumstances. The human manifestation is ENTIRELY dependent upon innumerable factors.

It's not, "You are nothing--period, end of sentence." It's more like, "You are nothing because you are apart of EVERYTHING." That said, however, the word "nothing" carries too much negative meaning. So instead how about saying, "You have no permanent self not because you're a bad person or a loser but because that "self" is LIMITING your enjoyment, peace and meaning. It's holding you back instead of allowing you freedom." When you realize that you are BOTH "you" AND everything else--How can you NOT see the "self" as limiting and imprisonment??? I like the analogy used by many that "I" am a wave:

D.T. Suzuki has the analogy of a wave on the ocean as symbolic of man’s sense of self. A wave arises on the ocean and looks down and sees the ocean all around. It says, “ I know that I am because I am not the ocean nor am I all the other individual waves, I exist separate from them”. It has separated itself from the ocean to know itself as an individual wave. This separation actually creates the ‘self’; it is both an act and a fact of this separation. Now it makes all its judgments as a separated self. In this act it is also separated from itself, it knows that it is but not who it really is. Now it tries to go outward to find itself but it cannot. When it goes inward it is also problematic, why, because the act of going inward is still the act of separating from the ocean to be able to go inward.

So this wave is alienated from itself, it’s surroundings and the ocean. But the fact of the matter is, who is the wave fundamentally? Is it the individual wave? No, there’s really no such thing. So who is looking for this awakening? The fact is that the wave is really just a manifestation of the ocean; it never was separated in reality but only knew itself as separated. It has to stop the ego process, the act of separating, in the hope that the ocean can rise up to see itself as both the wave and the ocean. It is one hundred percent wave and one hundred percent ocean, not at any point ever separated. The wave seeking the ocean/enlightenment/nirvana is the ocean seeking the wave. When the breakthrough occurs it is not new or just starting but a realization of what always really was. This is a non-dual duality. Both itself as wave and ocean.

JAMES: So we can quickly see that we are variations of the same essence repeating itself in beautiful, myriad ways in a timeless state. How can an individual wave feel that it has more meaning as just a wave then as a wave AND the entire, beautiful, amazingly diverse ocean!! Thus, Buddhism doesn't say, "You have no self (you're not an individual wave)...Thus you're worthless." If Buddhist teachings stopped there as Ben Dench seems to be implying then yeah, that would be pretty miserable. If that's what someone thought Buddhism to be then I can see why someone like Mr. Dench would say it's masochistic and leads to feelings of meaninglessness. However, you just read in the wave story--that's not the end. I think some people hear, "You have no self..." along with words like "emptiness" and that's all they hear. That would indeed lead to wondering why in the hell anyone would want to follow Buddhism!!

As the wonderful Neil deGrasse Tyson says, the same iron in meteors is the same iron that pulses through our veins--that's what Buddhist's are talking about when they deny the reality of the "self." It's the idea that we are larger than our individual "selves"--we are interdependent upon each other, which gives most people a tremendous sense of well being and meaning. Does that sound like nihilism to you?

Individualism is much more limiting and alienating than Buddhism as individualism's answer for all life's problems is extreme self-indulgence, which doesn't bring peace and lasting happiness. When self-indulgence doesn't work we deny everything and become angry, bitter and nihilistic. Buddha taught to avoid EITHER extreme of eternalism or nihilism. After trying to live both extremes himself he came upon the idea of walking the middle-path of neither extreme and finally he found peace. So when it's understood in this light it, no self actually gives a person GREATER meaning in life--not less. This is the context that is missing in the Dench article but I realize that in English the terms no-self and emptiness sound like annilation, pessimism, fatalism and nihilism.

Now that I am officially a philosopher (i.e., my salary is going to be paid by a philosophy, instead of a biology, department), I can indulge full time in reading philosophy without feeling guilty. I haven’t mastered the skill (of not feeling guilty) yet, but I’m working on it. This is also why I’m starting an occasional series of blog posts devoted to individual philosophers, picked among those that strike my fancy for one reason or another. Obviously, a blog post is not the appropriate venue for even a superficial look at the entire body of work of a major philosopher, so what I’ll do instead is to briefly comment on a number of major themes relevant to each particular case, and hope to stimulate people to read more about that philosopher. We begin with the 20th century British logician and moral theorist Bertrand Russell.

Russell was the first philosopher I ever read, beginning when I was in high school, and arguably the guy that got first got me into philosophy. It was one of those long and boring Sunday afternoons in my father’s house in Rome, which we spent listening to a radio broadcast of the soccer games of the day. I was scanning one of my father’s collections of books with the same cover, one of those things that people who don’t read, for some reason (guilt? shame?), like to have on their shelves so that they can pretend to have some interest in Culture, even though said books lie virgin on the bookcase and their owner couldn’t tell you the difference between Homer and Shakespeare if he heard a few lines of The Odyssey contrasted with excerpts from Hamlet.

At any rate, I picked up Russell’s autobiography, having vaguely heard the name before. I couldn’t put the damn thing down, and kept reading it as if it were a ravishing novel (which in a non-fictional sense, it is). After that I moved to Why I am Not a Christian, another hugely influential book in my youth, and so on with several others by Russell. I was hooked, and thirty years later I am about to become a real philosopher in the same department where the Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly is produced. But enough about me, let’s talk about Bertie.

Russell’s life was packed with the kind of events that fill several other people’s lifetimes, partly because he lived a very long existence (he died at age 98), but mostly because the man had an incredible amount of physical and mental energy. He married four times, wrote an astounding number of influential books and articles about philosophy, got in trouble with the law several times for his anti-war sentiments, and was denied an appointment at the City University of New York (where I am going in the Fall) because a judge thought that Russell’s opinions as expressed in his Marriage and Morals made him “morally unfit” to teach in American universities.

Russell’s chief interest in philosophy was in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, and his primary achievement in that field is the monumental Principia Mathematica, co-written with Alfred North Withehead. His project was to establish mathematics on entirely self-sufficient logical foundations, a project that eventually failed and was later demonstrated by people like Kurt Godel (he of “incompleteness theorem” fame) to be impossible in principle. Russell’s work was foundational and highly influential nonetheless. Russell is also commonly acknowledged as the father of what today is known as “analytic” philosophy (as opposed to the other major contemporary branch, so-called “continental” philosophy). The idea is that philosophy should be concerned with clarifying the use of language, eliminate confusion and get rid of incoherent or meaningless propositions (particularly abundant in certain writings on metaphysics).

Frankly, however, the aspects of Russell’s thought that I consider most relevant still to people today concern his politics and his writings on morality. Unlike many progressives during his lifetime, Russell recognized early on that the communist regime of the Soviet Union was a disaster for its citizens and for humanity at large, and was accordingly publicly very critical of it. In a typical fashion, here is how he managed to attack the Soviet revolution and the Catholic Church in one paragraph:

“One who believes as I do, that free intellect is the chief engine of human progress, cannot but be fundamentally opposed to Bolshevism as much as to the Church of Rome. The hopes which inspire communism are, in the main, as admirable as those instilled by the Sermon on the Mount, but they are held as fanatically and are as likely to do as much harm.”

Russell also clearly saw the threat of Nazism ahead of many others, and accordingly thought that World War II (unlike WWI) was necessary and justified. For a time he had high hopes about the role of the United States as a positive force in international governance, but those hopes were dashed by Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis first and by the Vietnam war later. He co-signed a document with Einstein in 1955 that led to the first Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs a couple of years later. Shortly thereafter he also became the first president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (from which he eventually resigned because the organization did not support the sort of civil disobedience for which Russell was arrested in 1961).

The man had guts, and had no qualms in fighting for, not just writing about, his ideas on a just and peaceful society. Accordingly, Russell wrote forcefully on a variety of other ethical issues, favoring women’s right to vote, access to birth control, and rights for homosexuals, to mention a few. In other words, he was (and still is) the conservative bigot’s ultimate nightmare. You’ve got to love the man.

Let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Bertie, concerning the issue of death and the zest for life:

“I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young, and I love life. But I scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.”

* An interesting article by Harriet Hall in eSkeptic about the placebo effect and how it works.

I especially like the quote at the end by the fabulous Neil deGrasse Tyson. As well as his quote about the iron in the giant meteor he mentions being the same iron in our blood. Interconnection is so damn cool!!!

That's in part (and the Sam. Harris quote about meditating in a cave like a mystic [or Buddhist I would add] but not making unjustifiable claims about those experiences) why I like the combination of Buddhism and science. Interconnection makes me feel so at peace and in harmony with all that is.

But back to the Sam Harris quote about being able to meditate but not making unjustifiable claims. Buddhist masters warn students that along the way they will experience all kinds of interesting phenomena in their brains upon deep meditation. However, those experiences are still ego trying to make special claims and declarations that these empty phenomena are something other than distractions. They are in fact (most meditation masters will tell you) false horizons/false feelings of realizing enlightenment. So like a diamond we shine forward and cut through all of these delusions.

You know, when I first started meditating and first go into Buddhism I use to think delusions were mainly ones that made you feel like you were worthless. However, the longer I practice the more I realize that often the hardest delusions to overcome and the ones that cause the most damage and cause the most setbacks to my path are delusions of grandeur.

~Peace to all beings~